Table of Contents

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: December 7

Here's Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for December 7th, including thoughts on 8.24b and 9.1 changes, quality of life work in 9.1 and more:

"Hi folks,

Usual Disclaimers

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler

8.24b and 9.1 changes on PBE

For the next couple of weeks you'll see a number of changes on the PBE, some of which are candidates for 8.24b (December 18th), some of which will be in 9.1 (early January). We're still assessing what should go into 8.24b versus what needs more testing.

Additionally various types of changes, mainly those that change anything that isn't just a number (e.g. different words on a tooltip, modified visual effects etc), aren't able to be included in 8.24b so will be in 9.1 as a result. Should have a fairly clear idea of what's going out this month and what's later late next week.

Quality of Life Work in 9.1

Speaking of 9.1 something else we're working on for it is range of improvements in a few categories.

Improved info when pinging certain abilities

For many global and semi global abilities, which targets are in range (Nocturne R, Caitlyn, Pantheon R etc)

Potentially extra useful info on other abilities, like ammo remaining on Heimer Q, whether Soraka is blocked from casting W due to lack of health (not just lack of mana) etc

Probably won't include ability to ping passives like Draven's to show number of stacks in 9.1. That's on our list of things to add, but likely requires some engineering work because of the way passives are set up differently to spells.

More use of the spell icon countdown border like Zoe Q uses to more clearly show duration of various effects to the player casting them.

Lot of potential users for this. Examples we're currently testing include Braum E, Jax R, how long Karthus has to start casting his R while in passive, Trynd R, Yasuo Q3 etc.

A bit more spell buffering

In addition to the buffering with Kat and Gunblade mentioned earlier in the week we're also testing out a bit of buffering on Zyra (QW and EW) and Jayce (QE)"

"One update since time of writing - might have a solution for Draven Passive after all. Possible that, and some other passives, do end up in 9.1."

Ranked Changes - Week One Update & Known Issues

Here's Riot SapMagic with a thread on Ranked after the first set of changes went live:

Hey everyone, Ed “SapMagic” Altorfer here on behalf of the Ranked team. This week, we started rolling out the first batch of Ranked changes to live. It can be disruptive whenever we make large changes to the game, but Preseason gives us some downtime to work out major issues before we kick off the season for real in January. Today, I want to give you a quick update on how things are going and what issues we’re currently looking into.

Master+ Tier Locking

Grandmaster and Challenger became locked with the patch as intended, but we experienced delays in setting all Master players to 0 LP.

Status: Fixed

Issues with LP Gains/Losses

Some players experienced unexpectedly high or low LP gains and losses after the patch, which could have resulted from the changes we made to tiers and divisions. We made some changes we think will help, but we’re watching how things settle, so please keep reporting issues.

Status: Partial Fix, Monitoring

Low Placements for New Players

Some of these issues may be related to the issues we experienced with LP gains and losses. I also want to clarify the intended behavior for placements since it’s changing:

If your account has never played a game in a particular Ranked queue, your initial rank after one game will be in Iron. You can climb higher throughout placements by winning games.

If your account has played Ranked in the past, we’ll seed you lower after your initial game so you can settle into your climb and have the chance to prove your skill. This is similar to how the system worked previously, but you only saw your rank after 10 games. Whereas now you’re seeing an initial rank after one, meaning it’s a bit lower than you might expect.

Status: Monitoring

UI Bugs
In a few places, players have reported confusing or broken UI elements:

[Fixed] Players were not seeing LP gains and losses on the scoreboard

[In Progress] The profile tooltip displaying past rank is incorrect for some players

[In Progress] The profile tooltip currently says “Past Highest Rank” - we’re planning to change it to reflect what it is: your highest ending rank of all queues from the previous season

[Not Started] When clicking a different player on the ladder on the Ranked dashboard the summoner name is not displayed

If you’re seeing other issues that aren’t captured here or you just have feedback about how things are going so far, feel free to hit us up in the comments below. We’ll provide additional updates as we have more information about these (and other) issues in the coming weeks. Thanks for all your help and feedback, and we’ll see you on the Rift!"

12/5 Mid-Patch Update - Heimerdinger Hotfix

After some issues with Heimerdinger after the release of Patch 8.24, a hotfix went out to correct the problems:

"12/5/2018 Bugfixes

Heimerdinger
This patch's work on Heimerdinger introduced new bugs. We're fixing some particularly big ones.

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: December 5

Check out Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for December 5th, including details on the Snowdown pass and Nexus Blitz, tower stats and rewards, and more:

"Hi folks,

Usual Disclaimers

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler

Snowdown pass and Nexus Blitz

Both the Snowdown pass and Nexus Blitz will be going live tomorrow morning (6th of December). First, some pass details:

The Snowdown pass is an updated version of the Worlds pass. You now get tokens from winning games, with half as many for a loss. Champion mastery grades no longer have any effect on tokens earned. You can also get some tokens from first win of the day, from missions and from orbs.

Prestige Akali's available this time.

There will also be some unique rewards that only work on Nexus Blitz/ARAM during this event (special recall VFX/audio, finisher vfx/audio, a fire poro pet). You can unlock those via a second type of token that can only be earned on Nexus Blitz. Can also get them with RP if preferred.

Pass runs until the 7th of January. More details, numbers especially can be found on Riot Mort's Twitter

Plus a quick refresh on what's up with Nexus Blitz:

We've done a lot of work on Nexus Blitz since its first run, with significantly better map art, improved events and rewards, some changes to the map geo, bans in champion select and more. If you never checked it out previously, or gave it a shot but found it a bit too unpolished, highly recommend giving it a try!

If Nexus Blitz proves to be really popular throughout its run we'll be looking into making it a permanent mode that's always on. If it gets a decent amount of play, but not enough to break the needed threshold for permanence we'll look at bringing it back as an RGM regularly instead.

Tower stats and rewards post preseason

So far tower stats and rewards are performing as we'd hoped. One of our key goals was to address cases where towers fell too quickly, cutting lane phase off too early. We didn't want to increase the length of longest laning phases by contrast, feeling those were already long enough. Looking at some stats:.
10th percentile (towers fall before this time only 10% of the time)

8.22 = 9 minutes, 11 seconds

8.23 = 11 minutes, 8 seconds

50th percentile (towers fall before this time 50% of the time)

8.22 = 12 minutes, 17 seconds

8.23 = 14 minutes, 1 second

90th percentile (towers fall before this time 90% of the time)

8.22 = 15 minutes, 35 seconds

8.23 = 15 minutes, 56 seconds

These are stats from all MMR ranges combined. When looking at high MMR only all of the above values are about 1 minute faster, both in 8.22 and 8.23.

Other goals were to make diving a bit more risky, via increased tower damage. We're still seeing a decent amount of diving going on, but with somewhat increased odds of a turnaround being possible, so that's also looking good so far. Still looking into data on the rewards side of things, will have that to share soonish. Also looks pretty appropriate though, with income up a bit but not dramatically, leading to champs more often leaving laning phase with their first big item completed as desired.

Lane Swaps

Lane Swaps are on our minds a bit given the changes to towers and game pacing. We don't want to see the game end up back in a state where early lanes are uncontested and champions just don't interact in organized play. We are open to early rotations or 1v2s as an occasional thing, though have some caution about how balance-able lane swapping as a more niche but viable option is, given it's been extremely frequent or missing entirely historically. Not concerned at present, given there are a lot of factors that should stop lane swaps being excessively powerful, or could be tuned to do so if needed. Plating gives more time to respond to towers going down. Plating rewards make it more costly to not defend your own towers. First tower gold, though smaller now, still exists as does tower fortification (50% reduced damage on top and mid outer towers in the first 5 minutes).

Katarina changes on the PBE

We've got a couple of changes to Kat's E hitting PBE I wanted to mention since they hard to spot or datamine and feedback on them would be useful:

Spell Buffering - Gunblade Active can now be buffered with all of Kat's spells. Should be particularly noticeable for higher ping players.

E - Cast time is now split into 0.075s before the blink and 0.075s after it, instead of 0.15s all up front. Should make E feel better when dodging incoming spells or picking up daggers."

"We're looking at it. Opinion is split internally on whether supporting stealth under towers is the way to go or not. We're doing some experimentation with a set of changes internally right now. Update to follow once those have helped resolve which direction we'll go."

"Need to see where Galio lands, follow up in 8.24b is certainly possible. Goal was to shift power around in a way that buffed him for regular play without adding power (or at least much power) for organized/pro. If he ends up weaker in regular play would want to add some power in, would be really hesitant to do ult CD though, given that spell offers more value in organized play.

Taking power out of Shen ult and moving it elsewhere is possible. We do see regular games get a lot more value out of the shield on Shen ult than the DR on Galio though, given Shen ult can be used more reactively and less proactively so doesn't reward practice and coordination as a team as heavily. Not sure reducing defensive value from it would necessarily be the way to go as a result."

Miscellaneous

Hello lovely people! So 2018 is coming to a close (holy Rammus that was fast) and I thought it'd be fun to look back at the stories that we got this year.
And pit them against each other in pseudo-deadly combat!

There was a bunch released - but I'm only going to be considering main-universe Runeterra stories, written content only, and for the sake of brevity, I won't include champ bios. So no comics, skin-universe, etc.

That leaves us, this year, with 25 contestants!

I'll be pitting two stories against each other, every day at 1:30pm PST, until the 29th of December (if I don't get hit by a bus). Today, we begin with...

FROZEN HEARTS vs AN EXPLORER'S JOURNEY (6th December)

In Frozen Hearts, by David Slagle, little Nunu asks his mother a question and she tells him a story.
In An Explorer's Journey, by Matthew Dunn, we read Ezreal's handwritten account of the discovery of a vault beneath Zaun.

Which of these stories spoke to you the most? Do you love snuggling by the fire listening to Nunu's mum telling you how the world works, or are you more of a fan of pomade and it's many (and unexpected) uses? Do you have criticisms of the characterization? Grammar? Were there things about these that made you happy or mad? Take this as an opportunity to revist these stories and identify what worked, or didn't, for you. It can be hard to get a discussion going on a story when it's no longer flavor of the month - so I'm hoping maybe this can be a second chance for us to air some opinions!

If this post works, there should be an image showing the schedule for the upcoming lore matches, at the top and also linked HERE, but alternatively, here they all are written out:

6th December: Frozen Hearts vs An Explorer's Journey

7th December: The Black Powder Plot vs Human Blood

8th December: The Girl Who Came Back vs At the Edge of the World

9th December: Leaving Weh'Le vs Art is Life

10th December: The Cage vs The Shadow Door

11th December: Stone Cold vs Hunter of Shadows

12th December: Stains on a Name vs The Monster of Kalduga Outpost

13th December: The Dreaming Pool vs The Curator's Gambit

14th December: Then, Teeth vs The True and Ghastly Tale of the Beast of Boleham Tower

"Our team wanted to be a bit more transparent around server issues, as well as other information that the NA playerbase may want to hear about. This is 100% a work in progress, so feedback around what’s here, or what you might want to see, is highly appreciated!

Your weekly dose of server problem-os, NA League news, and other! (Now moved to Thursday)

Dark Harvest nerfs (wee, Rune Variation!), Snowdown and All-Star 2018 are arriving soon™, and a bunch of changes to ranked placements may make Pre-season a bit easier. But we broke a lot of things on the other hand...

Server Stuff:

Store config change caused content to be unavailable (12/3/18, ~2 hours). A config push to the store caused content and pricing to be incorrect. Corrections had to be made to fix both the missing content and the pricing. No NA players should be affected.

Sashimi Akali/Statue of Karthus mispriced in Store (separate from the store issue mentioned above) (11/30, ~ 4 days). A misconfiguration in a sale caused a higher price than correct in a widget. Configuration issues were fixed after investigation of where and why the price was incorrect. If you bought either skin for 975 RP between 11/30 and 12/4, please write into Player Support so we can refund the difference

Signup Issues (12/3/18, ~ 3 hours). Discovered issues with the Signup flow, requiring that we disable signups to fix it. Once fixed, Signups were enabled again; stop being a sad mummy and play with some friends!

Neeko missions scheduled incorrectly (12/4 ~ 1 hour). Neeko missions were enabled in the client before Neeko herself was available (...sneaky bugger, ain’t she?). The missions are disabled until Neeko is enabled.

Game Stuff:

Malzahar disabled on TT (12/2/18, ~ 2 days). Malzahar can cause Altars to not work correctly on TT. While he was disabled, your semi-friendly voidling spammer has been fixed and re-enabled on TT.

A single game server crashed (12/3/18, ~ 1 hour). One single game server had issues finishing games, players were pushed off of it and the server was rebooted. Only a few dozen players should have been affected.

Nocturne Disabled (12/5/18, ~ 3 hours). Nocturne spooked the servers into preventing his ultimate from working properly. After lighting a few candles, his ult was fixed.

Queue Dodge Penalty WherE? (12/5/18, ~ 2 hours). Updates to the League and Ranked system broke queue dodge penalties. Currently coaxing ham and cheese out of the servers in order to fix it.

Player Support Trend:

A new patch usually brings out more in game freezes/FPS drops than normal. Try seeing if checking these steps for low FPS can eke a little more performance out after the patch.

Anyone here planning on playing this weekend? If any of you see me or Couch Commando, we may or may not be Neeko. You never know. Catch y’all in the Rift!

Morgageddon & Couch Commando"

Reminders

To round out this good good red post collection, here are a few reminders on current promotions or limited time events!

All-Star 2018 is running from December 6-8 in Las Vegas! Check out the All-Star event page for all the details on who, what, and where!